


love marks brighter than the city of lights

by dirtywings



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: M/M, Violence, and abuse, mentions of guns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-14
Updated: 2014-05-14
Packaged: 2018-01-24 17:07:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1612799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtywings/pseuds/dirtywings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mickey is 6 years old and he doesn’t understand why he trips on weapons instead of toys.</p>
            </blockquote>





	love marks brighter than the city of lights

**Author's Note:**

> this was supposed to be a poem, but i got caught up in too much words to say and not enough verses to fill. so i tried to write prose instead, which turned into too many feelings and not enough action. basically, this is a failed attempt at writing fanfiction. 
> 
> (there are mentions of violence, blood and guns)

Mickey is 6 years old and he doesn’t understand why he trips on weapons instead of toys.

 

 

 

All the neighborhood kids have them. Stained, broken, scattered as they may be, they are all toys nonetheless. Meanwhile, Mickey has pistols. Machine guns, rifles, revolvers. He already knows how it feels to how a gun in his hands. Knows how to clean it, to shoot it, knows the ins and outs, has heard the sound of shots too many times. He doesn’t even write properly, but he knows this. It’s almost like his life was made for this.

His father acts like so, at least.

He smells like acid and gun powder, and Mickey doesn’t understand why Terry never smiles.

He’s 6 years old and he doesn’t get why his mom’s wrists are so purple, when the rest of her is so very white. She is a statue, her fingertips are cold. Her body is almost a part of the furniture, stood still, splayed limbs across the couch. She cries and cries, but he doesn’t understand _why_.

There are no ‘I love you’s, rosy cheeks or open arms. There are only needles and empty bottles. Terry screams, screams, and there’s a part of him that shatters and crumbles every single time. Meanwhile, his mother carries 3 thousand pounds on her back (or so it seems by the way she always bends to the side and can never walk around without using the walls as support). His mom doesn’t smile, either. _But that he knows why_.

 

Mickey doesn’t even know how to read yet, but he knows how to hug his sister tightly, to shield her from the riot coming from the kitchen, and the way his father’s words seem to pierce trough his skin. He is too small for that, but he hopes that they don’t make her bleed the way they make Mickey bleed.

 

Mickey doesn’t understand why in his house there’s either constant shouting or endless, unbreakable silence.

 

 

He doesn’t understand and this is only the beginning.

 

//////////

 

Mickey is 8 years old and gun shots are his alarm clock.

He crawls out of bed, his tiny legs struggling to reach the cold wooden floor. It’s almost noon and he’s hungry, but his brothers are too wasted and his mom is too passed out to make something for him. Mickey hears his sister crying in her room and the only thing he can do is feel the weight of her screams in his shoulders as if he’s crumbling. Mickey is 8 years old and, well, maybe he is.

He stumbles on empty bottles and loaded weapons, his house feels like a minefield. Every word is a calculation, every step is burning coal and shivering ice at the same fucking time. He tries to make it right, because he wants to be a good boy, he wants to stop feeling so much pain, he wants to be loved by him.

 

“What am I doing wrong?”

 

“Why can’t he love me?”

 

He asks to himself over and over again, but it doesn’t stop his father from throwing his fist across Mickey’s face. He doesn’t want to, he tries his hardest not to, but as soon as Terry’s hand finishes it’s course Mickey has to bite his bottom lip not to say ‘sorry’, as if being beaten by his own father is his fault. He stands still, though, doesn’t let the weight of the hit make him stumble, denies the stubborn tears to fall off his face, and promises himself that this is the last time he will ever feel pain.

Mickey is 8 years old and he’s so tired already.

 

He’s 8 years old and his blood is scattered on the floor like it’s part of the decoration.

 

//////////

 

Mickey is 10 years old and his brothers give him beer for the first time.

“Don’t throw up”, Mickey thinks. “Don’t throw up or you’ll look like a pussy.” And he doesn’t even know what that word means, but he hears it so often, thrown across the kitchen table like stained napkins or old bread. He hears it, he feeds himself with it and it turns out to be the thing he lets come out of his mouth.

 

Pussy.

 

“Don’t be a pussy”, Iggy tells him.

“Just fucking do it, it’s cold and nice, don’t make us look bad.” Tony mutters between weed-induced laughs.

 

Mickey is so small, Mickey _feels_ so small (and insignificant, and _wrong_ ). The way his brother’s silhouettes seem to mount over him and shatter him entirely doesn’t help much, either. He looks at them and he can’t see where they end, where Mickey himself begins. There are people all around him, screaming and laughing so hard Mickey wonders if their throats bleed. He feels helpless; he’s a fish amidst sharks.

 

Mickey is 10 years old and all he wants is to be a dragon.

 

What burns like fire, though, is the way the beer runs down his throat. He twists the fabric of his shirt, holds himself on the ground with the weight of his feet. Doesn’t squint his eyes, doesn’t let the fire return to his mouth. He holds it all down, just like his pain, just like his bruises, just like the hunger that never really settles, never really leaves. He holds it all in and swallows hard.

 

His eyes become an ocean, but Mickey doesn’t allow himself to drown.

 

Mickey is 10 years old and _he can’t_ , for the love of God, allow himself to drown.

 

//////////

 

Mickey is 12 years old and the last and only glimpse of his childhood is taken from him.

He’s the fastest kid, the smallest kid, the angriest kid. He carries thunders inside his heart and he already bites his lip hard enough to draw blood without even flinching to the pain (because he doesn’t feel it, he can’t, _he promised himself_ ).

There’s green grass under his feet and Mickey runs until there’s no air left in his lungs. He stains the ground with his own piss because the world deserves to stink, deserves to be ruined, because _this_ world let life ruin _him_ , so it’s only fair that he fucks it up in return.

Mickey wants to bash knees and color his bedroom with red, and he doesn’t admit that part of it is because his father never showed up to his baseball games, and now he never will. Because the world doesn’t allow good things to come for someone like Mickey fucking Milkovich. No, the world laughs and scowls, the world spits on his face and makes him swallow it down with a smile.

 

He says goodbye to the last part of a happiness that never really seemed real to him.

 

_(Almost like the pictures of his mom, wrinkled, covered in dust. As if she never existed in the first place, as if everything that belonged to her was part of a story they had invented for themselves. He let that story get lost in between his cells and freshly-opened knuckles. He allowed the memory of his mom to die between his ribs.)_

The bones on his back feel heavy, and he grins, because he can almost taste the revenge and the blood on his mouth, he can already feel the weight of his father’s hand on his cheeks (the weight of his words on his mind, _“always the words”, he thinks_ ), but as he promised himself years ago, there won’t be any; not a single fucking amount of pain attached to it.

 

Mickey is 12 years old and the world never let him be a child.

 

Mickey is a child, but his life is a god damn battlefield.

 

//////////

 

Mickey is 15 years old and being gay may not be a choice, but he sure as hell wished he could turn it off.

Not that he doesn’t like boys, or that he doesn’t want to like them, it’s the fact that _he can’t_. Not when he is who he is, when he lives where he lives. And especially not when his father comes bursting trough the door, shouting proudly about how he bashed a "faggot’s" head three blocks down the street.

“You should’ve seen him, kid” He screams and Mickey knows his father would’ve done the same to him without thinking twice. “Made him beg just like he does when he takes it up in the ass. Well, used to, because now there’s no way any dick can get in that ass any time soon.”

He opens up a beer and sits on the sofa, pats the sit next to him for Mickey to join him.

“You got to teach them a lesson, son.” And Mickey has to smile while he tries his hardest not to throw up.

 

_Mickey’s brain is scattered all over the side walk._

 

“I know pa, I know.”

 

 

Mickey smells the blood and fear in Terry’s clothes, imagines himself beating the kid and being killed by his own father all at once.

 

 

The moon dies and the house breathes like steady lungs. If anyone paid enough attention they could probably hear Mickey’s heart beat rising from where he stands inside his bedroom. He tries to feel good inside, tries to see large hands holding him tight, caressing his face. H _is bruised, ugly, spit-on face_. He shuts his eyes and as his heart races, he tries to picture happiness, safety, tries to grasp strong legs and lick lemon-scented sweat from a boy’s chest. But there’s just Terry and blood all over the street. He can’t breathe then, because _hell holds his neck_ and his father laughs because it’s Mickey that he cracks open, and in some twisted sense, he knows it. It’s with his misery that Terry paints his walls.

 

He takes a 30-min long shower and scrubs his skin to clean it off the blood that’s not even there, that’s not even his, _but it might as well have been._

 

On the same night he burns all of his magazines and drinks himself to sleep.

 

 

Mickey is 15 years old and he’s on both sides of the gun, _but he never chose to hold it._

 

//////////

 

Mickey is 17 years old and all he sees is red.

Red in bloody t-shirts, red in bedroom sheets, red between his fingers, red freckles, red hair;

 

Red fire in Ian’s eyes.

 

At first he doesn’t remember his name, and he doesn’t care. Ian is lost between his childhood memories and in a sense of self Mickey doesn’t know still lies inside of him, in an innocence he doesn’t even know exists.

 

Then Mandy is crying, Mickey calls his brothers, and the kid needs to die.

 

He looks for him everywhere, screams and paints his name all over the neighborhood. No one hurts his sister. No one hurts the one good part of his family, the part that’s worth something, the part that’s actually a bit beautiful. No one hurts Mandy.

 

He makes his brother – Lip – bleed while he doesn’t find him. Everyone pays for each tear drop.

 

One morning, though, Mandy comes home shining, tells him to leave Ian alone - to leave her _boyfriend_ alone - and Mickey is left with thorns in his stomach.

 

A week later he finds himself stealing the store where Ian works at. Finds himself looking for him among chips and soda cans. Grins every time he steals in front of Gallagher. Mickey ends up taking Kash’s gun from the guy’s hands because he can’t risk being shot by him. What he doesn’t expect is to be woken up by Ian two days later.

His bedroom smells like beer (just like the rest of the house); he’s lying down on his stomach when he feels something cold touching him. “Mickey” a voice calls him, and fuck him if it doesn’t sound sweet.

There’s a lot of fighting, a lot of punching, a lot of touching. Then there’s ripping off clothes, mouths and tongues. There’s red on Mickey’s hands and it isn’t blood – _“fuck, it isn’t blood, this isn’t blood”_ -, Ian makes him forget that there’s a gun pointed at his head. He’s quiet but makes all the right noises, makes Mickey realize that he’s sensible in all the places he always thought were there to be _scarred_. His hands trace patterns on his biceps as he fucks him and Mickey doesn’t understand why someone would touch him so gently. There are infinite freckles over his collarbones and he wants to feel them, wants to lick them, smell the corners where Ian’s body breaks and twists. He wants so much, he needs so much, _and Ian takes his time giving it to him._

He forgets where they are, where his father is, what they are doing. He forgets everything because for 15 minutes his heart pounds for one single reason.

 

Terry walks on them and Mickey thinks that he’s about to die. He shakes so much his teeth ache. But he leaves them soon after, without gun shots, without punches, without kicks. The threatening words are left hanging in the air but for the moment Mickey thanks (to something he’s not quite sure he believes in) that the last bit of red he had seen was not blood, but the glimpse of himself on Ian’s eyes.

 

Mickey gets up and takes a shower to try to take Ian’s smell off of him, to try to wash himself over and slip down the drain, to see if the water makes enough noise to shut down the words inside his head.

 

He gives the gun back to Ian, then. Because it’s the only way he can thank him for making him let go. Forget. _And find a place of peace_. Even if it was for just 15 minutes.

 

He doesn’t kiss him, though. Ian doesn’t mind too much, either.

 

Mickey is 17 years old, his body is on fire, and the fuel is named Ian Gallagher.

 

 

Mickey is 17 years old, and for the first time in his life, he feels he might not mind burning.


End file.
